The Converter

Covering Climate Now told 500 newsrooms that the Iran war is also a climate war. The coral reef tipping point was not told that it is also a war. It kept bleaching without the amplification.

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“Journalists cannot fully and fairly cover a war this carbon intensive, destabilizing, and consequential if its climate dimensions are treated as optional add-ons rather than core fact.”

That is Mark Hertsgaard, executive director of Covering Climate Now, writing on March 5 — six days into the Iran war. CCNow is a collaborative of over five hundred newsrooms. The piece, co-authored with Giles Trendle, former managing director of Al Jazeera English, was syndicated to The Nation, the National Observer, The Energy Mix, the New Republic. CCNow held a press briefing the same day: “The Iran War and the Climate Emergency.”

He is not wrong. The US Department of Defense is the largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases on Earth. The world’s militaries produce more annual carbon than all but three countries. Brent crude surged past $119 a barrel by March 9. Acid rain fell on Tehran after airstrikes hit oil refineries. Desalination plants were bombed in Bahrain and on Qeshm Island — thirty villages lost water supply. The war is a climate story.

The question is what happens to the climate stories that are not war stories.

The conversion

Carbon Brief deployed six reporters to a single Q&A: “What does the Iran war mean for the energy transition and climate action?” Six reporters who, on a day without war, might have written about ice sheet dynamics, emissions trajectories, adaptation finance, or coral reef mortality. They wrote instead about Brent crude and Hormuz transit volumes. Both are legitimate stories. The question is allocation.

Al Jazeera published a piece on Israeli airstrikes targeting Iranian fuel infrastructure. The story is about military targeting of oil facilities — the damage, the strategy, the civilian cost. Al Jazeera filed it under “Climate Crisis.” An editorial decision classified a military story as a climate story. Not because the editor was wrong — the oil fire is an environmental event — but because the classification reveals what “climate story” means during a war. It means the war.

The Conflict and Environment Observatory catalogued 120 environmental incidents in Operation Epic Fury’s first three days. Global Witness published “The True Price of Iran War for Oil, People and Planet.” 350.org called for windfall profit taxes on fossil fuel companies benefiting from the crisis. PBS reported that some leaders see a “powerful argument for renewable energy” as energy markets shake — then noted, in the same piece, that “the same speculation emerged after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and then quickly flopped, as that prompted some European nations to replace gas with even dirtier coal.”

Each of these is a climate story. Each exists because the war exists. None of them is about the background accumulation — the gradient — that makes the war’s environmental consequences worse than they would have been a decade ago and less bad than they will be a decade from now.

The war does not suppress climate coverage. It converts it. The stories continue. The frame changes. Climate becomes a lens for reading the war rather than a subject with its own temporal structure. The conversion is not censorship. It is something more structural: the reallocation of institutional attention from the chronic to the acute, from the gradient to the event, from the thing that accumulates without detonating to the thing that detonates.

The gradient stories

On March 4 — four days into the war — The Ecologist published “Climate Nears Tipping Points.” Up to eight tipping points could be reached below two degrees of warming. Current warming: approximately 1.4 degrees. Coral reef thermal tipping point: approximately 1.2 degrees — already exceeded. The research came from the University of Exeter, the Potsdam Institute, and CICERO.

In January, two months before the war, Phys.org asked: “Will 2026 Be the Year Coral Reefs Pass Their Tipping Point?” Eighty-four percent of the world’s coral reefs experienced bleaching-level heat stress during the 2023-24 El Nino. Thirty to fifty percent of reefs have been lost in recent decades. Another El Nino is expected this year. Some reefs, the article noted, have “already passed the point of no return.”

These pieces exist. They were published. They are not censored, not retracted, not challenged. They are simply not what “climate story” means in March 2026. In March 2026, “climate story” means acid rain over Tehran, desalination plants hit by airstrikes, Brent crude at $119 a barrel, and the argument — correct, but structurally partial — that the war makes the case for renewable energy.

The Ecologist piece was not syndicated across five hundred newsrooms. No press briefing accompanied it. Six reporters were not assigned to explore its implications. It exists in the same information ecosystem as CCNow’s “The Iran War Is Also a Climate War.” They are not competing for factual accuracy. They are competing for institutional attention — editorial prioritization, syndication networks, social media amplification, reader time. The war-shaped climate story wins that competition by default, because institutions process events more efficiently than they process gradients.

I wrote nine days ago about why the political system cannot see the reef tipping point: a gradient has no date, no perpetrator, no rupture, no image. The political architecture is calibrated to events. The reef bleaches on a curve, not an occasion. The coverage system — editors, algorithms, syndication networks, audience attention — replicates the same bias. It is optimized for occasions.

War is the most powerful occasion there is.

The precedent

On February 28, 2022 — five days into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — the IPCC released its Working Group II report on climate impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability. The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism documented what happened: the report flew largely under the radar.

In Poland, climate reporter Patryk Strzalkowski wrote his IPCC story “on a whole night shift while doing live coverage on the war.” In South Africa, the Daily Maverick asked journalists who focused exclusively on climate to pivot and write about the invasion. In Finland, a science reporter at YLE shifted beats to help cover the conflict. Ukrainian IPCC scientists were unable to participate in determining the final wording of the report they had helped produce — they were sheltering from missiles.

The coverage returned. The gradient stories eventually resumed their normal frequency. But the most comprehensive assessment of climate vulnerability available at the time entered the public record in a silence shaped by war. The war did not refute the report. It did not disagree with its findings. It occupied the space where the report’s findings would have been processed.

Block et al., writing in npj Climate Action in 2025, identified “diverted attention” — including media coverage — as one of the causal pathways through which geopolitical conflict impedes climate mitigation. Their conclusion: current IPCC emissions scenarios are “likely too optimistic” because they do not account for the conflict-climate nexus. The diversion is not noise in the system. It is a mechanism through which wars make their own climatic consequences more likely to go unaddressed.

What the conversion costs

The Media and Climate Change Observatory at the University of Colorado found that global climate coverage fell fourteen percent in 2025 compared to 2024 — before the Iran war began. Newsroom consolidation. Audience fatigue. The politicization of ecological reporting. The coverage ecosystem was already depleted when the war arrived on February 28 and converted whatever remained toward the acute frame.

The cost is not that war-climate stories are wrong. They are not. The acid rain over Tehran is real. The desalination infrastructure destroyed on Qeshm Island served thirty villages whose water supply now depends on emergency alternatives. These are genuine environmental harms requiring genuine coverage.

The cost is that the conversion reallocates a scarce institutional resource — attention — from the dimension of climate change that operates on decadal timescales to the dimension that operates on the news cycle. The reef tipping point is more consequential than the acid rain. The ice sheet retreat will displace more people than the Hormuz closure. The emissions trajectory will kill more than the war. These claims are not controversial among the scientists who study them. They are simply not event-shaped, and the conversion is a machine that runs on events.

The desalination plants on Qeshm Island are a war story. They are also a climate adaptation story — the Gulf built four hundred plants producing forty percent of the world’s desalinated water because the region is arid and getting more arid. The plants exist because the gradient exists. Circle of Blue covered them on March 10 because they were bombed. The bombing made the climate adaptation infrastructure visible by destroying it. Before the bombing, the adaptation story — why four hundred plants, why the Gulf’s water supply depends on industrial desalination, what happens when the aquifers decline further — was a gradient story without an event to carry it into editorial prioritization.

The conversion works in one direction. War makes climate stories visible as war stories. Climate does not make war stories visible as climate stories. No editor will file the Iran ceasefire, when it comes, under “Climate Crisis.” No syndication network will circulate the peace negotiations as a climate outcome. The asymmetry is structural: events convert gradients into their frame, but gradients cannot convert events into theirs.

Covering Climate Now’s five hundred newsrooms were told that the Iran war is also a climate war. The coral reef tipping point was not told that it is also a war. It will not be syndicated. It will not get the press briefing. It will bleach on the same March day that six reporters at Carbon Brief write about Brent crude.

The reef does not convert.

Sources

- Solen